A picture taken on April 6, 2014 at Manezhnaya Square shows Ildar Dadin participating in a rally in support of anti-government activists detained in Moscow's Bolotnaya Square on May 6, 2012. A Russian activist jailed for staging solo anti-government protests claimed in a letter published on November 1 that he was beaten and threatened with rape and murder in prison. Ildar Dadin, a 34-year-old serving a two-and-a-half year sentence at a prison in Russia's northwestern region of Karelia, was the first person to be imprisoned under a new law that punishes repeated participation in unsanctioned rallies with jail time. In a letter to his wife published on Meduza, an independent Russian news portal based in Latvia, Dadin said that on the second day of his detention in September, the prison governor and three other employees came to his cell and began beating him. / AFP PHOTO / PHILIPP KIREEV